Tumble & Fall

End-of-the-world story doesn't live up to its premise.
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A Lot or a Little?
The parents' guide to what's in this book.
What Parents Need to Know
Parents need to know that Tumble & Fall is a natural-disaster story, because it follows the week leading up to an asteroid's collision with Earth. The book chronicles the reactions of three Martha's Vineyard teens and contains some mature scenes of partying, kissing, and even virginity losing -- as one might expect from adolescents facing the end of the world. Occasional strong language ranges from "s--t" and "f--k" to "a--hole." The three protagonists have various emotional issues and family dysfunction to deal with, so the story will make readers think about what they would want to do or focus on if they were faced with a similar catastrophe.
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What's the Story?
TUMBLE & FALL is a story about the end of the world with a premise similar to the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact: An asteroid named Persephone is barreling toward Earth and is predicted to collide with the planet -- in only seven days. Three Martha's Vineyard teens deal with the impending apocalypse with wildly differing priorities: Zan, still grieving the loss of her high school love Leo, embarks on a last-minute trip to the mainland to figure out if his love was true; formerly suicidal Sienna has been released from a group home to live with her dad but ends up falling for a guy she meets; and Caden is mysteriously kidnapped by his long-lost father and just wants to get back home.
Is It Any Good?
Alexandra Coutts has written a catastrophe story that doesn't in any way focus on the widespread chaos that would befall Earth if a huge asteroid were about to strike it. There's no page-turning immediacy and no pulse-pounding scenes of masses trying to escape or survive (The 5th Wave this is not). Instead, Coutts offers a more thoughtful, gentle tale of how three very different teens deal with their own last week on Earth. By setting the book mostly on the lovely New England island of Martha's Vineyard, Coutts doesn't bother with too much of the horrors going on in the rest of the world.
What starts out as a promising idea fails to live up to the grand premise, though, mostly because the three narratives are so unevenly developed, and the three characters' choices are often so difficult to understand. Instead of it seeming romantic that Zan would leave her parents to go on a mission to find out if the perfect, genius surfer poet Leo cheated on her, it's horrifying (at least from an adult perspective) that she'd just up and leave her parents (who are busy creating one last piece of art for the apocalypse). Sienna's desire to find love -- however misguided and certainly brief -- is slightly more palatable, but Caden's crazy story with his rich, estranged father never really works. To make a story about the possibility of The End work, an author needs to make you care. And, although Coutts isn't a bad writer, the slow pace and the characters' incomprehensible decisions make it difficult to invest in this story.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about the popularity of young adult novels with multiple points of view. Were you interested in all three story lines? Did you prefer one character to the others?
How does this book compare to other end-of-the-world tales? Were you surprised by the pace, given its genre?
Reactions to Armageddon range from adamant denial to thoughtful acceptance. How do you think you would react to such earth-shattering news?
Book Details
- Author: Alexandra Coutts
- Genre: Contemporary Fiction
- Topics: Friendship, Science and Nature
- Book type: Fiction
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication date: September 17, 2013
- Publisher's recommended age(s): 12 - 17
- Number of pages: 384
- Available on: Nook, Audiobook (unabridged), Hardback, iBooks, Kindle
- Last updated: July 12, 2017
Our Editors Recommend
For kids who love thrillers and science fiction
Themes & Topics
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